On the bad faith/”truth seeking” point, I’ve also noted some issues in the way “truth seeking” is used in a previous post, and thinking about this case gave me an idea. It seems like there is a general phenomenon in EA/rationalist discourse where intent gets obscured or ignored somehow. Perhaps not surprising for intellectual communities that are very into consequentialism?
I think the effect of using the “truth seeking” terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/evidence/etc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isn’t lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being “insufficiently truth seeking” could refer to any of these, and thus using the phrase fails my principle of clarity. It also becomes strongly subject to motivate reasoning or motte/bailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole “hard to dispell misunderstandings” thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to soft ban someone for this. Is the implicict message that only easy to dispell misunderstandings are allowed? Surely not. But it makes more sense if you imagine its implicitly standing in for a spectrum of actions based on intention:
Bad faith: intentionally obscuring your real views, often with the goal of making them harder to respond to.
Genuine mistake: unintentional, even of hard to dispell
Game playing: being coy or cagey about what your views really are or in some way deliberately making your position confusing or hard to respond to.
The last one I think is kind of what Said was being accused of in the post referenced above? But IMO its extremely clear that you haven’t been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about “epistemics” being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on “truthseeking” too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
“Truthseeking” as a term drives me bananas because it’s so vague and ambiguous — I looked really hard and couldn’t find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all — and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And it’s definitely never clear to me that the person who’s accused of “not truthseeking” is doing anything wrong, or making bad points, or that their views are wrong. It just seems like an argument got heated.
If people say “not truthseeking” and they just mean “bad evidence/bad arguments/ill-informed points”, they should just say that. Ditto for “bad faith” if that’s what it’s supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. It’s a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said I’m not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was “motivated” to find examples of uncivil behaviour on the EA Forum (?). These all feel like such foreign understandings of my intent. And the throughline between them feels like Toby is telling himself a story about me where I’m out to cause trouble or something. I don’t know. I really can’t understand what’s happening here.
I do feel like I’m transparent. I don’t know why someone would think I’m sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, there’s all this emphasis on secrets, game theory, strategizing, signalling, counter-signalling, yada yada. Does that make people feel especially suspicious of each other? Or of “outsiders”?
This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:
I don’t really feel like many people in the rationalist community communicate very openly or honestly, even though non-deception is often thought to be one of their core tenets.
Somehow this rings true to me, although I don’t know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because there is such a lack of psychological safety in the LessWrong community, people become cagey and withdraw into themselves in order to self-protect. Just a hunch.
I also wonder about the snarkiness thing. In the LessWrong community, my impression is that like 90%+ of the time (NB: not a rigorously obtained number) people are just faking being nice or polite, or just not even faking it. The “game” (as it were) is to say the rudest thing possible in the least polite phrasing you can get away with. Does this make people mistake — outside of that context — genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?
Thanks for your kind words.
On the bad faith/”truth seeking” point, I’ve also noted some issues in the way “truth seeking” is used in a previous post, and thinking about this case gave me an idea. It seems like there is a general phenomenon in EA/rationalist discourse where intent gets obscured or ignored somehow. Perhaps not surprising for intellectual communities that are very into consequentialism?
I think the effect of using the “truth seeking” terminology is to confuse multiple possibilities around intent:
Lying: intentional
Insufficient rigor/evidence/etc.: can be an unintentional mistake
Callousness about the truth: I think people often feel like even if someone isn’t lying, they can demonstrate a disregard for truth that feels like its intentionally misleading
Being “insufficiently truth seeking” could refer to any of these, and thus using the phrase fails my principle of clarity. It also becomes strongly subject to motivate reasoning or motte/bailey dynamics because the meaning can shift among these different meanings.
I feel like something similar has happened here with the whole “hard to dispell misunderstandings” thing. Tskeen laterally, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to soft ban someone for this. Is the implicict message that only easy to dispell misunderstandings are allowed? Surely not. But it makes more sense if you imagine its implicitly standing in for a spectrum of actions based on intention:
Bad faith: intentionally obscuring your real views, often with the goal of making them harder to respond to.
Genuine mistake: unintentional, even of hard to dispell
Game playing: being coy or cagey about what your views really are or in some way deliberately making your position confusing or hard to respond to.
The last one I think is kind of what Said was being accused of in the post referenced above? But IMO its extremely clear that you haven’t been doing anything intentionally misleading. I think this is an instance of concerns about “epistemics” being used in an unproductive way that creates a lack of clarity around intent.
Oh, you wrote that post on “truthseeking” too!! I forgot that!! Another helpful post.
“Truthseeking” as a term drives me bananas because it’s so vague and ambiguous — I looked really hard and couldn’t find any real attempts to define it clearly, if even to define it at all — and pretty much the only way I see the term get used is when someone wants to slam someone else they disagree with. And it’s definitely never clear to me that the person who’s accused of “not truthseeking” is doing anything wrong, or making bad points, or that their views are wrong. It just seems like an argument got heated.
If people say “not truthseeking” and they just mean “bad evidence/bad arguments/ill-informed points”, they should just say that. Ditto for “bad faith” if that’s what it’s supposed to mean.
Thank you for seeing me clearly. It’s a huge relief. I found it super confusing and hurtful when Toby said I’m not engaging in good faith, that I was snarky when I was really being heartfelt and sincere, and that I was “motivated” to find examples of uncivil behaviour on the EA Forum (?). These all feel like such foreign understandings of my intent. And the throughline between them feels like Toby is telling himself a story about me where I’m out to cause trouble or something. I don’t know. I really can’t understand what’s happening here.
I do feel like I’m transparent. I don’t know why someone would think I’m sneaking around.
Do you think this is a LessWrong subculture thing? I notice in the LessWrong-o-sphere, there’s all this emphasis on secrets, game theory, strategizing, signalling, counter-signalling, yada yada. Does that make people feel especially suspicious of each other? Or of “outsiders”?
This line from a post by a pseudonymous person involved in the LessWrong community always sticks out in my mind:
Somehow this rings true to me, although I don’t know if I can put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because there is such a lack of psychological safety in the LessWrong community, people become cagey and withdraw into themselves in order to self-protect. Just a hunch.
I also wonder about the snarkiness thing. In the LessWrong community, my impression is that like 90%+ of the time (NB: not a rigorously obtained number) people are just faking being nice or polite, or just not even faking it. The “game” (as it were) is to say the rudest thing possible in the least polite phrasing you can get away with. Does this make people mistake — outside of that context — genuine niceness or politeness for secret snark?